Wagner’s music is eminently quotable. There’s something about short musical fragments repeated with ever-mounting intensity that, not very surprisingly, breeds some formidable earworms. Tristan und Isolde is arguably the greatest culprit of all, with its highly distinctive opening Prelude and the overwhelming passion of its closing ‘Transfiguration’. Artists ever since have inserted anything from a covert homage to a clear quotation in their own works for stage, concert hall and screen.

One of the first to jump on the Tristan bandwagon (maybe somewhat incongruously) was Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. He mined Tristan for the opening of the overture of the G&S parliamentary fairytale Iolanthe, which had its premiere in 1882. Muted strings feel their way to a ‘Tristan chord’, but instead of Wagner's endless melody they quickly resolve into a Mendelssohnian parody – surely something of a send-up.

Sullivan wasnt the only one to mess around with Tristan. Debussy deftly mocks the Prelude’s intensity in his playful piano piece ‘Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk’ – that distinctive rising motif becomes a crude grotesque repeated over and over again at inappropriate intervals in Debussy’s cruel parody. Samuel Barber makes similar use of Tristan’s sense of licentious excess in his song Nuvoletta; matching the wordplay of James Joyce’s text as Nuvoletta ‘sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus’, the last three words mapped on to Tristan motifs of increasingly heated fervour.

Luis Buñuel similarly draws on Tristan’s overt erotic overtones, also with an occasional sense of mockery. Buñuel and his co-writer Salvador Dalí managed - in the 1927 film Un Chien andalou - that rare task of upstaging the Tristan chord, where the opening of the Prelude follows the image of a razor slicing an eye as clouds bisect the moon. But their true tour de force came three years later with L’Age d’or, where the music of Tristan follows two lovers who attempt to get it on despite society’s interventions. In one infamous scene an onscreen orchestra accompanies the frustrated woman as she sucks a statue’s toe, out of sight of the bourgeois audience who calmly sit through the music’s erotic histrionics.

So overt is the romantic passion of Tristan that it wasn’t long before it became a Hollywood shortcut for lovers, preferably the doomed kind – just as much as Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ has come to represent war. In fact, Frank Borzage’s excellent 1932 film adaptation of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms manages to fit them both in. Milan Roder’s score ‘borrows’ swathes of Wagner, drawing on the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in the film’s breathtaking war sequence (at 1:01:35 below), and the ‘Liebestod’ to make sure we don't miss the extreme tragedy of stars Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes’s very tragic ending.

A few of Roder’s Hollywood successors have found more imaginative ways of adapting Wagner. Franz Waxman created a whole Wagner violin fantasia for Humoresque, a 1946 Joan Crawford melodrama where the Tristan sounds are used, unsurprisingly, to represent her doomed love affair with violinist hero John Garfield. And Bernard Herrmann’s acclaimed score for Hitchcock's Vertigo makes more than a passing nod to Tristan in its theme for doomed lovers James Stewart and Kim Novak.

In recent years Tristan has meant more to movies than doomed love affairs. Bernard Rose’s ‘Hollywood tragedy’ Ivans xtc. draws lengthily on the score in its opening credits and closing sequence, representing not the ecstasy of love but the enormity of death. A similar impulse lies behind the opening of Lars von Trier’s extraordinary apocalyptic drama Melancholia, which uses the Prelude in its entirety to encapsulate the inevitability of death and destruction.

The production is a co-production with Houston Grand Opera and is given with generous philanthropic support from Peter and Fiona Espenhahn, Malcolm Herring, Bertrand and Elisabeth Meunier and Lindsay and Sarah Tomlinson.

Beaumarchais’s three satirical ‘Figaro’ plays guaranteed him lasting fame – particularly the first two, immortalized in opera by Rossini and Mozart. The irrepressible energy of Le Barbier de Séville (the first and most lighthearted of Beaumarchais’s comedies) proved irresistible to Rossini, who in Il barbiere created a comic masterpiece. In Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart focussed primarily on the most human aspects of Beaumarchais’ second ‘Figaro’ drama (while keeping plenty of the original’s humour), to create one of the warmest and most life affirming works in Western art.

In his great political drama Maria Stuart, Schiller criticizes monarchical absolutism and highlights the dangers of power, embodied in the character of Elisabeth I, who sends her cousin Maria Stuart to death without a fair trial. Donizetti and his librettist Giuseppe Bardari kept much of the play’s essential message in Maria Stuarda; but they also removed the complicated political subplots, and created a love triangle between the Duke of Leicester and the two queens. Schiller’s explorations of the dangers of absolute power, the benefits of democracy and the heroism of freedom-fighting also provided inspiration for Rossini (in Guillaume Tell) and Verdi (in Don Carlo).

Hugo’s great drama depicting the amorous exploits of King Francis I of France was banned after just one performance in 1832, due to its unflattering depiction of a French monarch. When Verdi came across the play in 1850 he described the subject as ‘grand, immense’ and the character of the crippled jester Triboulet (who became Rigoletto) as ‘one of the greatest creations in theatre’. He and his librettist had to fight energetically with the Italian censors to get permission to use Hugo’s play – necessary amends included changing the King into a lower-ranking Duke and moving the action from France to Italy. However, much of the play’s plot and dramatic tone remained intact. Rigoletto was a sell-out success and is still one of the most popular of all operas.

Maurice Maeterlinck’s fantastical Symbolist plays are rarely performed today, but his Pelléas et Mélisande was hugely popular in the 1890s. Maeterlinck’s aesthetic – the exploration of characters’ inner feelings through elements of the natural world, often in a fairytale-like setting – was regarded as a welcome contrast to the naturalism prominent in Parisian theatre of the time. Debussy described the effect of seeing the play in 1893 as ‘like dynamite’ for him. He treated Maeterlinck’s text with great respect when he wrote his opera, leaving much of it intact and only omitting a few short scenes. He also ensured that every nuance could be clearly conveyed, with a predominantly syllabic word setting, almost like ‘sung speech’.

Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired one of Benjamin Britten’s most popular operas, composed in less than nine months. Britten and his partner Peter Pears (who took the comic role of Flute/Thisby in the opera’s premiere) wrote the libretto, skillfully compressing and reorganizing Shakespeare’s text while sticking faithfully to the Bard’s words – Britten noted that they added only one line of their own. Britten heightened the supernatural strangeness of the fairy scenes by making Oberon a countertenor (a voice rarely used in opera at the time) and Puck a spoken role, and added to the comedy of the rustics’ Pyramus and Thisby play by deftly parodying grand and bel canto opera.

Maria Stuarda runs 5–18 July 2014. Tickets are still available. The production is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

Rigoletto runs 12 September–6 October 2014. General booking opens on 15 July 2014.

Claude Debussy, one of the most influential composers of his era, was born in the western suburbs of Paris in 1862. From an early age, the composer was as argumentative and radical as he was talented, challenging the rigidity of his formal training at the Paris Conservatoire and striving to create a new music: ‘Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand?’ he wrote. ‘The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.’ A self-taught and brilliant pianist, he favoured dissonances and developed a unique sound world. Though he was often identified as an Impressionist, it was a term he despised, dubbing those who appropriated it ‘imbeciles’.

To celebrate Debussy’s birthday, we’ve picked out a few examples of the composer’s music that have inspired choreographers:

Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun)

Originally conceived as a symphonic poem for orchestra inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé's poem of the same name, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faunehas become one of Debussy’s most famous works, alongside his iconic symphony La Mer and sole opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Its opening, chromatic flute solo remains one of the most famous passages in musical modernism. It was made into a short (and controversial) ballet for the Ballets Russes by Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912, with staging and choreography reminiscent of ancient friezes. This overtly erotic work is considered one of the first modern ballets. The work was reinterpreted by Jerome Robbins in 1953, who transposed the setting to a sunny ballet studio. It was later referenced in Queen’s video for I Want to Break Free, in which Freddie Mercury danced the role of the faun alongside Royal Ballet dancers, with choreography by Wayne Eagling.

Jeux

Although somewhat eclipsed by the infamous premiere of The Rite of Spring that took place two weeks later, Jeux (Games) with its erotic subtext added to a controversy-filled 1913 for the Ballets Russes. With a narrative based on a game of tennis and a lost ball that leads to a departure into the garden bushes, the score was Debussy's last completed work for orchestra. It changes speed every two bars and is striking for almost never repeating any musical material – the composer described how he created the work for ‘an orchestra without feet’. Like L'Après-midi d'un faune, Jeux was also choreographed by Nijinsky, who originally intended it to be a flirtatious exchange between three male dancers. However, company impresario Sergei Diaghilev insisted it be danced by one male and two females.

Monotones

Debussy's 1896 orchestrations for his friend Erik Satie's 3 gymnopédies catapulted Satie to fame – much to Debussy's later chagrin. Debussy orchestrated only the first and third, believing the second did not lend itself to orchestration; Satie acolyte Alexis Roland-Manuel later completed the triptych with his own orchestration. Discovering the music years later, Ashton was struck by its form and hypnotic purity, and went on to craft a masterpiece of other-worldly beauty.

Alastair Marriott created Sensorium in 2009, setting it to Debussy’s Préludes, orchestrated by Colin Matthews. The Préludes, originally written for solo piano, were written late in Debussy's life. They were divided into two books of twelve each, published in 1910 and 1913. Marriott opted to use seven préludes, including two for solo piano, which he set as mesmerizing pas de deux.

Which Debussy works do you love?
Or, if you could create a ballet scored by one of the composer’s works, which would you choose and why?